Egg Freezing

What’s all the Buzz About Freezing Your Eggs?

If you are young, single, still pursuing a degree or a career, or simply not ready to start a family, you may have noticed all the press about egg freezing. If you are pretty sure you want kids, but you have questions… ‘Where do I go?’, ‘Whom do I talk to?’, ‘Is this going to work?’ Here are some of those answers.

We all have a “biological” clock, but imagine if you were able to stop your eggs from aging. Through a new revolutionary freezing process, you now can. Once the eggs are thawed, fertilized, and implanted in your own uterus, you now have the option to start your family whenever you are ready. Wouldn’t that be something worth considering? Well, here is more information about this process.

The reality is that the quality of a woman’s eggs declines significantly after age 35, declines further after 40, and is generally of extremely poor quality by age 45. In the past, the only option was to fertilize eggs and freeze these embryos for the future. This remains the best option if you have a committed partner or sperm source but isn’t an option for all women. Therefore, egg freezing is a viable alternative for those women. With this new advanced technique for freezing eggs, you can now preserve your options for the future.

At Laurel Fertility Care, the process for preserving a woman’s eggs starts after approximately 10 days of ovarian stimulation. At that time we may be able to retrieve 10 or more eggs. During a 30-minute retrieval procedure, the eggs are removed from the ovaries, the internal fluid replaced with a special culture fluid “antifreeze” (to prevent ice crystals) and then rapidly frozen in a glass-like state (vitrification). The eggs are then stored in a liquid nitrogen tank until you are ready.

Although egg freezing is a viable option for some individuals, the numbers aren’t always as rosy as what you read in the news. Some women may not produce a lot of eggs, or respond to hormone shots at all. Early slow freeze protocol success rates were discouraging. The number of eggs needed to allow a successful pregnancy was higher using this method and not all women would make as many eggs as is necessary and may have needed to undergo several cycles. However, the new vitrification method for egg cryopreservation seems to be much more promising. So far, only about 200 babies around the world have been born from frozen eggs. The chance of success is best with a fresh IVF cycle. The chance of getting pregnant after an IVF cycle using frozen eggs is currently less than 20 percent, but for some women, this remains the only option. Indeed, the technology is rapidly improving, but egg freezing is still considered experimental and not recommended as a viable alternative for delaying having children. However, for some women, this is a new option they never had in the past, a chance to have a child in the future.

Our practice features a nationally accredited state-of-the-art laboratory managed by Marlane Angle, PhD, HCLD allowing us to provide all of the most advanced assisted reproductive techniques. Dr. Angle is world renowned in the application of the vitrification process, a technique used in freezing eggs and embryos as a form of fertility preservation.